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FAIRFIELD — Jessica Kittell Gaudette was just pulling a shallow metal pan of tomatillo salsa out of her big Garland oven Monday when I arrived for a morning-long lesson in the art of turning garden crops into pickles, relishes and chutneys.

Lesson 1: “Even at home you should not be afraid of using the oven,” Gaudette said after a brief hello as she gave the salsa a stir.

“So many things will burn if you cook them on the stovetop. The oven gives you more flexibility,” she said. “You can get a much thicker salsa or tomato sauce if you cook it long and slow in the oven.”

Within minutes it was clear that Gaudette could dispense authoritative advice, tell stories and opine on Franklin County politics all while grinding her way through baskets of hot peppers for relish, pureeing cherry tomatoes for salsa and putting up six quarts of garlic dill pickles before lunch.

She is 41, a stocky woman in jeans, a T-shirt and an apron covered with hens. She moved around her kitchen — and offered instructions — with economic grace and complete assurance.

“Recipes are a guide, not a Bible,” she said, and for three hours offered a river of offhand advice and canning tips drawn from nearly two decades in the summer kitchen. It was a mini graduate course in home preserving.

Shoppers at the Burlington Farmers Market know Gaudette as the owner of Black Creek Preserves, a longtime purveyor of rhubarb cakes, pickles and jams. Nearly all the ingredients are plucked from the garden outside the summer kitchen she shares with her parents, Bill and Sen. Sara Kittell, D-Franklin, on a hilltop on Chester Arthur Road.

Gaudette’s garlic dill pickles are crisp as potato chips. Her homemade ketchup is rich and spicy, packed with flavor that makes store-bought stuff seem flavorless and dull. Her rhubarb chutney — well, let’s just say it transforms a lamb burger into a gourmet meal and that it was painful to share one of the season’s last jars at an office tasting session.

Lesson 2: 'Start with the highest quality ingredients.'

After a childhood in the country and a history degree from the University of Vermont, Gaudette drifted into preserving in 1994 in her early 20s.

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She and a friend set up a farmers market stall, “Wild Woman Pickles,” although they knew little about pickle-making. Gaudette sold jam, her friend baked pound cake. They made a few dollars.

Her partner soon moved on, but Gaudette had found her métier. She became a self-taught maker of pickles, relishes and chutneys.

Now, nearly 20 years later, she concocts infinite variations on those themes, dictated by what’s ripe in the garden and an acquired knowledge of what flavors work together.

Midway through Monday morning, for example, she pureed freshly picked Sungold cherry tomatoes and stirred them into the thickened tomatillo salsa from the oven, the sweetness of the tomatoes balancing the sour tomatillos.

Lesson 3: 'NEVER make garlic dill pickles with regular eating cucumbers. They get wet and soggy like jelly. Gross!'

While most home canners have declared cucumber season at an end by Labor Day, Gaudette was still at it this week, slicing Little Leaf pickling cucumbers into spears or coins. I grabbed a knife and began to help.

While we worked, Gaudette talked about why she spends the summer on her feet over a hot stove.

“This is my life,” she said. “We do this as a family. My dad does the garden. My mom picks berries and bakes pies, my aunt Mae comes two days a week and does whatever needs to be done.”

Twelve years ago, Gaudette and her parents built a freestanding summer kitchen across the driveway from her parents’ home and beside the acre-and-a-half of gardens ringed by 200 rhubarb plants, the fruit Gaudette describes as her signature product.

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Gaudette lives a short distance away with her husband David, a building contractor, and their six-year-old son, Davy.

“I’m a bad summer mother,” she sighed. While other families take summer vacation trips, she’s in the kitchen. On the other hand, she and her husband have months off in the deep of winter and then have time to tend the 3,000 taps in their sugarbush.

“We don’t make a ton of money, but we have paid off the mortgage and don’t have a ton of bills,” she said. The off-time in winter is important to her.

“We do too much in this life. When do you have down time? Time to think about things?” she said.

Lesson 4: 'Do the work!'

“Pick your vegetables by 9 and don’t let them sit around in the fridge. Process them by noon,” Gaudette said, and we got to work.

The cukes, most of them a bit bigger than my thumb, had been scrubbed and been trimmed of their blossom ends. Following Gaudette’s lead, I stuffed a flowering head of dill and a few leafy fronds into the bottom of a quart jar, then cut inch-thick slices of cucumber directly on top of the dill. When the jar was full, a pristine clove of garlic (“never use a garlic clove with any imperfections — it can cause trouble faster than anything”) went on top.

Gaudette added 1/8 teaspoon of pickling spice: one or two juniper and allspice berries combined with mustard seed and celery seed. “I insist on mustard seed and celery seed. Everything else is to taste,” she said.

Lesson 5: 'The brine is the real secret.'

“I’m giving away my secrets,” Gaudette said. “I use store-brand apple cider vinegar from Hannaford’s. It’s the least sweet and the most stable. I’ve made my own vinegar and I’ve bought expensive vinegar, but they have inconsistent acidity. Then you want water. Not out of the tap. No chlorine. If you live in the city, use bottled water.”

While Gaudette prepares her brine, she is bringing the water in her canning kettle to a boil. The hot brine — four cups apple cider vinegar, four cups water, 2.5 tablespoons of Morton’s pickling salt for four quarts of pickles —is poured into the waiting jars of cucumbers and spices, the lids go on finger-tight and into the canner for four minutes of processing. (Gaudette notes that is a shorter time than recommended by the U.S Agriculture Department).

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We paused for a moment and Gaudette opened a quart of her garlic pickles. I was struck first by how crisp they were, almost as if they had just been picked. Then my taste buds sorted out the layers of garlic, dill and juniper. All the flavors were there, but none dominated or overwhelmed the crunch of the pickle.

It was one of those heart-sinking moments, when you realize you can never go back to supermarket pickles and — since you are unlikely to grow, pick and process all your own cucumbers — the household budget will have to be increased to cover occasional $10 quarts of localvore pickles.

The garlic pickles, and Black Creek’s other products, are sold each Saturday at the Burlington Farmers Market. Gaudette also has helped develop a virtual farmers market in Franklin County.

Customers of yourfarmstand.com can see an online list each week of meat, eggs, vegetables, cheese and baked goods produced by local farmers. They pay online, then pick up their food once a week at the Fairfield town library or Walker’s store in St. Albans.

The operation still is small, but its organizers hope to build the business, perhaps by making deliveries at St. Albans businesses with many employees.

Though the county is the dairy center of Vermont, Gaudette described it as a “food desert,” where locally produced food can be hard to procure unless you grow it yourself.

Lesson 6: 'Chutney is a flavor profile.'

As pickling season winds down, Gaudette is preparing to make apple chutney and apple plum chutney.

Apple chutney? I asked. Yes, she said. As with pickles and salsas, there’s no need to confine oneself to traditional ingredients or to be daunted by an exotic-sounding concoction.

“Curry, cumin, cinnamon, ginger and a balance of sweet and hot,” she said. “Raw ginger, not powdered.”

As with salsa and tomato sauce, she cooks down her chutney in the oven. Left overnight in a 200-degree oven, the blend of chopped fruits and vegetables, spices and a vinegar-maple syrup cooks to a consistency you can stand a spoon in. (See recipe.)

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Chutney and crab apple jelly mark the end of Black Creek’s preserving season and the start of Gaudette’s winter break.

A summer standing on the concrete of the kitchen floor “used to hurt less,” she said, but “I still like it. In the spring I still love it.”

“I like the community of the farmers market, I like the freedom my life gives me. I like growing things and seeing a full basket of vegetables and deciding to make something new.”

Black Creek Preserves apple chutney

Note to cooks: The ratio of vinegar to sugar will vary depending on the tartness of the fruit and personal taste

Makes seven 8-ounce jars

5 pounds of fruit and vegetables (about 12 cups chopped). Any combination of apples, plums, green tomatoes and onions. For the apples, choose a mix of two varieties, one (like McIntosh) that breaks downs into a sauce, the other (Cortland, for example) that holds its shape during cooking. 2 cups apple cider vinegar 3½ cups of brown sugar or maple syrup, or a mixture of the two ¼ cup grated raw ginger 2 tablespoons curry powder 2 tablespoons chili paste with garlic

Directions:

Chop the fruit roughly, into fairly large chunks.

Bring the vinegar, sugar and spices to a boil on the stove. Add the rough-chopped fruit and cook until thick, stirring continually to prevent the fruit from burning.

(Alternatively, spread the whole mixture in a pan or pans. The pans should be deep enough to contain the fruit but shallow enough to provide maximum surface area. Cook overnight in a a 200 degree oven or until the mixture is thick. Then return mixture to a stovetop kettle, bring briefly to a boil and proceed with the next step.)

Pack in eight-ounce jars, put on lids finger-tight and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.